Marketing Personas – An SEO marketing perspective

Marketing Personas – An SEO marketing perspective

A marketing persona is a detailed demographic, professional and perhaps even more importantly, behavioural profile of the prospective customer(s) you are targeting. As a marketer, your goal is not only to get in front of your target persona but to present to them your value proposition in terms that align to their priorities. The better you can understand your target customer’s persona, the more effectively you can gain visibility in their lives, and the more likely they are to engage with you based on a value proposition that is compelling for them.

Your definition of a marketing persona may include:

DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS:

income level, male or female, geographic location, natural language and perhaps second languages, age profile, marital status, family status, special interests such as sports etc…

PROFESSIONAL CHARACTERISTICS:

Their job function and seniority, the professional language they use, their qualifications, their primary and / or post-grad degrees, their hopes and aspirations, institutes or professional associations they are members of, their people responsibilities – peers and direct reports etc…

BEHAVIOURAL CHARACTERISTICS:

Their social, political, economic, religious and cultural values, the things that they own, the places that they visit; where they like to go, what they like to do, their life priorities, etc….

BEHAVIOURAL INFLUENCES

Armed with as much of this information as you can glean, think about the things that influence the behaviours of your marketing persona. Who are the people that influence them most? What are the key persuading influences that drive their behaviours? Where do these influences come from. If possible, try to map out “A Day In the Life Of….” (ADILO) your target persona. See if you can identify opportunities where you can intercept the normal daily running of their lives – opportunities where the potential exists to create a touch-point, a brand experience where they can be exposed to your value proposition at a time when they can be attentive or engaged. In a traditional marketing sense, this could be when they are in the car (radio), at home from work (TV), at work (online) etc…

SEO MARKETING AT WORK

Most marketing personas tend to spend a percentage of their working week online in one context or another. This often means using a search engine for purposes of research, shopping, discovery or a multitude of other reasons. If you understand your target persona, you have significantly improved your ability when it comes to researching their search behaviours in the internet. “Keyword research” , as it used to be called, is no longer adequate to describe your online target audience. Equipped with a marketing persona definition, you can now engage the process of researching your persona’s “key-phrase search behaviours”. You can do this because you now have a context within which searches take place. This means that you can provide a focus for your SEO initiative which explicitly intercepts the behaviours of your intended targets, allowing you to align your website’s value proposition directly to its intended reader. Your conversion rates will thus improve as a result.

PraxisNow will work through your target personas as part of your SEO marketing engagement with us. Please call 01-2360076 if you would like to explore this further.

Both directly and with our partners, your project will be in the hands of people who are competently trained and experienced in the project component for which they are accountable. Projects that are managed by PraxisNow will involve a senior executive level project manager who can communicate at board level and who has the knowledge and experience to take key decisions during each implementation phase of your projec.